War on terror's hidden front

Staff Sgt. Cynthia Ramirez sums up the mission of AFRICOM, the Pentagon's newest command: 'Hearts and minds. And we're showing the bad guys we can go anywhere.'

Staff Sgt. Cynthia Ramirez sums up the mission of AFRICOM, the Pentagon's newest command: 'Hearts and minds. And we're showing the bad guys we can go anywhere.' (Tribune photo by E. Jason Wambsgans)

Paul SalopekTribune correspondent

The desert is a war.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Cynthia Ramirez roared through it in an unmarked Land Cruiser, projecting the awesome might of the U.S. military into a wasteland little seen, much less penetrated, by outsiders. The landscape was like a slap—an eye-stinging waste of salt pans and glass-blue mountains that was still inhabited by Muslim warrior-nomads, the Afar, tough customers who long ago had swapped their traditional spears for Kalashnikovs.

Behind Ramirez, in an expanding cone of dust, bucked three more Toyotas, an Army truck loaded with corrugated metal sheeting, and 14 armed, sweating American soldiers and sailors. Their improbable objective: reroof a school at a fly-speck nomad camp called Lahossa.

"Hearts and minds," Ramirez, a voluble and shaven-headed Texan, hollered over the engine. "And we're showing the bad guys we can go anywhere."

The bad guys were potential Islamic extremists. But anywhere, at this jaded stage in the global war on terror, was literally and metaphorically off the map: a remote African laboratory for the long anti-terror struggles of the future.

As the Bush administration draws to a close and prepares to hand the job of ending the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to President-elect Barack Obama, few Americans may realize that another major U.S. military campaign is taking shape elsewhere on the globe—this time in the most obscure, lawless reaches of Africa.

The Pentagon recently unveiled AFRICOM, its historic new military command devoted exclusively to Africa—a sprawling continent of 1 billion people, roughly half of whom are Muslim, that has long been overlooked by Washington's strategic planners.

AFRICOM represents a stunning shift in U.S. military doctrine, despite its relatively modest start-up cost of nearly $400 million. It reflects mounting concerns like those outlined just last week by the director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, who warned that North Africa and Somalia are now second only to Pakistan's tribal areas as growing Al Qaeda threats.

After seven years of aggressively confronting Islamic militancy head-on with major combat operations—and after soberly weighing the impact of those two big wars on a frayed U.S. military—the Pentagon is hoping to apply an innovative, soft-power approach in Africa.

"Our measure of success," said Vincent Crawley, an AFRICOM spokesman, "is to not fight a war in Africa."

Such efforts at "waging peace" aren't completely new; the Pentagon has tested similar programs in the Philippines in recent years. But this war-prevention strategy has never been applied on such a vast, continental scale. Nor is it without its critics.

Many African governments complain that their own security worries aren't linked to international terrorism, but to more basic challenges of political stability. They also fear that the U.S. military's surprising new interest in Africa—even with its gentler, kinder face—masks a hidden agenda to secure the continent's increasingly valuable natural resources, oil foremost among them.

Humanitarian organizations, meanwhile, warn that the Pentagon's desire to shoulder charitable works in Africa sets a disturbing example for the continent's frail democracies, emphasizing military supremacy over civilian rule.

"The Americans are expanding the role of their military at the exact same time that Africans are trying to keep their own troops confined to barracks," said Wafula Okumu, an analyst with the Institute for Security Studies, a think tank in South Africa. "It's sending the wrong message at the wrong time."

This, then, is a story of what may be the least-known yet most important American war in the world: a blueprint for how the U.S. will conduct its increasingly controversial anti-terror wars in the developing world.

It is a conflict whose surreal roll call includes bearded proselytizers from the Taliban strongholds of Pakistan who wander squinting, fresh off bucket flights from Karachi, in the sun-cracked markets of Africa; homesick Pacific Islanders teaching the art of ambushes in the parched cradle of humankind; and some of the most xenophobic nomads in the world, the Afar, who are famed for cutting off their enemies' most vulnerable appendages and offering them as trophies to their wives.

Staff Sgt. Ramirez, 34, a tattooed native of Mexico raised in Brownsville, Texas, was an unlikely spear tip in this uncharted frontier in the war on terror, leading in effect a dress rehearsal for AFRICOM's ambitions.

"Bummer," she said when her convoy pulled into Lahossa after four hours of bone-jarring cross-country driving. "Looks like nobody's home."

Most of the Afar had pushed their goats into neighboring Eritrea. Ramirez stared out over a stricken landscape that had knocked off generations of Victorian explorers. She ordered her team to roof the derelict schoolhouse anyway.

The Pentagon builds everything to U.S. code. So once fuel, salaries and helicopter transport were factored in, Lahossa boasted what was possibly the most expensive tin roof in Africa.

Then the members of Team 13, C Company, 486th Civil Affairs Battalion collected their trash. Caked in dust, they vanished into the shimmering waves of heat.

Every war carries within it a certain iron heaviness, a particular emotional gravity. But this one often seems like a mirage. And it has no audience.

JIHAD'S NEXT HAVEN

Vast, unstable, beautiful and poor, Africa was never supposed to present a threat to the United States. The last time the U.S. military paid any serious attention to the continent was two decades ago, during the Cold War, when American weaponry and advisers stoked proxy battles there against the Soviet Union.

With the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a botched UN peace-enforcing operation in Somalia in 1993—a fiasco dramatized in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down"—even humanitarian missions withered. Today, however, Africa looms large on Washington's radar.

With Al Qaeda apparently in retreat in Iraq, and with a marked decline in terrorist activities in the Far East, there are only two places in the world where violent Islamic radicalism appears to be on the rise seven years after 9/11. One is in the Taliban heartland of western Pakistan; the other is the immense, ungoverned hinterlands of Africa.

An exhaustive study on global terrorism published by the RAND Corp. in July noted that Al Qaeda's bloodiest franchise today is, in fact, African: Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, based in Algeria, has snuffed out hundreds of lives with car and suicide bombings in recent years. Now experts worry that the group is poised to activate cells in Europe.

And then there is Somalia. The world's oldest failed state is now home to a vicious Islamist insurgency. More than 9,000 civilians have been killed and 750,000 more displaced by the violence since 2006, when the U.S. supported an invasion by Christian-led Ethiopia.

Alarmed that parts of Africa may be shaping up as the next Afghanistan—an outlaw haven for international jihad—the U.S. has marched into the continent on two fronts.

First, while the American public has remained absorbed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. troops have been rotating quietly through the deserts of Muslim North Africa, offering humanitarian services to some of the world's poorest people. Other U.S. forces are training ragged local armies to fight extremists. According to one tally compiled by the African Security Research Project, a think tank critical of the militarization of Africa, total U.S. security spending on the continent has been rising steadily in recent years, to well over $1 billion a year.

Second, overall U.S. aid to Africa is set to double to $8.7 billion by 2010, federal budget records show. Much of it is earmarked for the Bush administration's huge effort to combat AIDS.

These numbers should make humanitarian groups overjoyed. But instead, many longtime aid workers in Africa are worried.

In testimony before Congress earlier this year, the humanitarian group Refugees International noted that the Pentagon's share of charity dollars has mushroomed more than sixfold, while the portion controlled by traditional civilian agencies such as USAID has shriveled.

In Africa, U.S. military planners have doled out the bulk of that help to Ethiopia and Djibouti—two close allies in the war on terror—and not the neediest nations.

Even Robert Gates, the defense secretary who may be kept on by Obama, has fretted publicly about the growing militarization of America's philanthropy.

Still, newly strategic Africa has pioneered that trend.

"If somebody had told me 10 years ago that we would be spending billions in Africa, and that Congress had approved that, I would not have believed it," said Mary Yates, the civilian deputy to the commander of AFRICOM. "But I think there is recognition on a policy level of our national interests there, and not just for the global war on terror."

Yates downplayed the more controversial U.S. concerns in Africa: oil and China's rival appetite for it.

The world's poorest continent made history last year by selling more petroleum to the U.S. than the entire Middle East. Some 20 percent of the refined foreign crude sloshing in Americans' gas tanks now comes from countries such as Angola or Nigeria. In a decade or so, Africa will be America's biggest oil supplier.

For the moment, the number of U.S. troops deployed on the sprawling continent, which is bigger than the continental U.S., Europe and India combined, is almost vanishingly small: roughly 2,000 to 3,000 service personnel.

This boot print, faint by design so as not to inflame African nationalism, imbues the whole U.S. military experiment in Africa with a ghostly, almost Cold War sense of deja vu.

Startled Ethiopian passengers landing at a rural airport might suddenly encounter U.S. airmen offloading mysterious crates from a gray Air Force C-130 cargo plane. Or a tea shop owner in a slum near Manda Bay, Kenya, will serve crew-cut strangers in uniform. Or tourists visiting what is reputed to be the most isolated town on Earth—Timbuktu, Mali—will have their fantasy ruined when U.S. Green Berets roar past in a Humvee.

Timbuktu: TB2, the U.S. military now unromantically code-names it.

PRECINCT CAPTAIN IN THE DESERT

In desolate northern Djibouti, a former French colony in Africa's Horn, Staff Sgt. Ramirez fought her own small corner of Washington's quiet war in Africa from a ramshackle hotel with a plank bar facing the Gulf of Aden.

Hotel Le Golfe, in the infernally hot town of Tadjoura, was run by a dour ex-French Legionnaire with hair dyed the yellow of processed cheese spread. "Rick's Cafe" from Casablanca it wasn't. But its clientele included South African backpackers, turbaned businessmen from Yemen and Pacific Islanders in pixelated desert camouflage. These were members of the U.S. territory of Guam's National Guard, the main U.S. military trainers on Africa's Horn.

Ramirez's own AOR—or "area of responsibility"—took in some 3,000 square miles of the Afar Triangle, a treeless badlands straddling Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her orders resembled those of a Chicago precinct captain: Be friendly. Show the flag. Don't get suckered.

Ramirez was to keep an eye and ear tuned for bush-level intelligence, such as smuggling from Eritrea, a country unfriendly to the U.S. Most important of all: Spend a maximum of $2,500 on quick-hit development projects like clinics or irrigation ditches in a bid to win over some 170,000 nomads who converted to Islam a millennium ago.

The Afars were a hard test case for America's charm offensive.

Famously haughty (Afar means "The Best") and infamously resistant to domination, the sandaled herders fought a civil war against Djibouti's central government in the early 1990s. They are so clannish that some experts doubt whether the U.S. or Al Qaeda could make serious inroads in their rustic camps.

Yet apparently, extremists had scored some successes among the culturally conservative but religiously moderate herders.

"Pakistani preachers do visit our area," said Ishmael Abdulrahman, a young Afar who recalled how a friend had been seduced by promises of religious study in the Taliban homeland along the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. "They come again and again, first to teach pure Islam. Then they convert you to jihad. My friend has been gone six months. Maybe he is dead."

Indeed, recent military intelligence—including data gleaned from an Al Qaeda laptop confiscated in Iraq during a 2007 U.S. military raid—suggests that a quarter to a third of the foreign militants who fought in Iraq came from Africa. (Most were Algerian.)

And so Ramirez visited the blistering-hot Afar encampments six or seven times, until the people started to wave. Her initial effect on the grizzled herders was always the same: five seconds of slack-jawed speechlessness.

"It throws them that I'm a girl," she said during a water-well inspection. "They see my haircut, my uniform and my arm tattoos, and then they hear my voice. They just hold their faces and giggle."

The lone woman in her unit, foreign-born and unabashedly out of the closet because she planned to leave the Army—"Don't ask don't tell, bull----," she said of the Pentagon's rules for gays in the military—Ramirez held a layered outsider status that seemed to enhance her role as the Pentagon's ambassador to the medieval Afar.

A sassy, no-nonsense veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, Ramirez cajoled skeptical Afar elders into donating labor to building projects. Her men, meanwhile, stewed in their vehicles, debating the differences between Kmart and Wal-Mart.

On one grueling commute through the African wilds, Ramirez's convoy stopped to readjust its load of construction timber. A nimbus of sunlit dust briefly swirled about the Americans. One U.S. soldier got out into the 120-degree heat and held up a bottle of water, as if toasting the burning emptiness. An Afar man, dressed in the tribe's shin-length skirt, materialized from the glare, took it without a smile and walked back into the lunar plain.

Such are the marketing moments—a far cry from Iraq and Afghanistan—that the Pentagon hopes to sell to Africa's half-billion Muslims.

ON A MISSION FROM GOD

So what, then, will the long war against Islamic extremism look like—not next year, but a decade or two down the road? One answer lies next to the airport in Djibouti city, the dilapidated capital of Djibouti and host to the only U.S. military base in Africa.

Camp Lemonier, rented from the Djibouti government for $30 million a year, has all the hallmarks of an overseas U.S. military post at the dawn of the 21st Century: 20-foot-high blast walls; Marines in watchtowers; ranks of locomotive-size generators that drown the area in an industrial hum day and night; and a contractor-run Green Bean Coffee Hut that sells $2.75 Latte Frappes.

The base's 2,000 personnel live in boxlike Containerized Living Units—CLUs or "clues"—arrayed in a sizzling grid, like a well-armed trailer park outside Phoenix. The palletized necessities of American life bleach under the African sun: acre upon acre of bottled water, barrels of fuel, piles of sewage pipes, containers of strawberry Pop-Tarts—an X-ray of the guts of a small U.S. town exposed for all to see.

Camp Lemonier is the only U.S. base dedicated solely to counterterrorism. Its troops' non-buff physiques literally reflect that soft-power mandate. They include military engineers. Doctors. Veterinarians. Police advisers. Economists. Civilian women in cargo pants and men in Oxford shirts bustle through the base's gravel alleyways: State Department and USAID officials.

"We're hoping to give Africans the ability to solve their own problems," said the camp's senior mission planner, Maj. Greg Catarra, sounding a lot like a spokesman for the UN.

Ticking off a Samaritan's list of recent well-drilling, cattle vaccination and free dental-care missions carried out in East Africa by the Pentagon—at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars—Catarra added: "We're not just into building schools and leaving. We're here for the long run. We're about sustainable development."

Staff Sgt. Ramirez, though, has had enough.

"Djibouti is it," she announced earlier this year, leading her convoy down sandy streets back to the dingy hotel in Tadjoura. "Africa is it for me."

A 15-year Army veteran, Ramirez was the closest thing the U.S. had to a hardened campaigner in the mold of the colonial troops that Europe once fielded across the world a century ago. But her Africa tour had sunk a good job prospect with a police department in suburban Atlanta, she said.

Tadjoura was, by coincidence, the site of the first European colonial toehold in the Horn of Africa. The French landed here in 1862. When Ramirez rolled through, it hardly looked like the emerging front of yet another colossal ideological battle, but it was.

Ramirez was driving fast and didn't glimpse her polite competitors, Pakistani pilgrims who might be considered a sort of anti-AFRICOM, ambling down an alleyway.

There were four of them, clad in loose shalwar camises, as if they had just alighted from a bus in Peshawar, at the foot of the Hindu Kush, which was virtually what they had done. They were heavily bearded Pashtuns from a district of Waziristan, a Taliban stronghold where Osama bin Laden is reputed to be holed up.

They were startled when an American visitor knocked on their compound door.

"We are not here for fighting," said Mohamed Shakil Khan. "We are only here to teach what Islam says is haram," forbidden.

Like Maj. Catarra back at Camp Lemonier, Khan began ticking off a list, only his enumerated not goodwill projects but prohibitions: music, movies, uncovered women. Nervously, he offered a small bottle of perfume as a gift. And overhead, U.S. jets thundered above the waiting deserts of Africa.